If approved by King County Council, voters will decide whether to support the proposal in an April ballot.
KING COUNTY, WASHINGTON – On Tuesday, January 31, the King County Council will vote to send the crisis care center tax to King County voters for the April ballot.
The $1.25 billion proposal would be paid over nine years, between 2024 and 2032, and would be funded by property tax increases of about $10 a month for the average homeowner.
The money will help build a network of five crisis care centers, fund the recruitment and retention of community behavioral health workers and increase the number of inpatient treatment beds.
“This is part of helping people emerge from this crisis, recover, and be self-sufficient again,” said King County Executive Dow Constantine.
Constantine said the crisis care center levy is the answer to a problem that arises in King County every day. Historically, federal and state funding has been allocated to treatment facilities, but funding has dwindled in recent years, he said.
“Underinvestment is on our streets, it’s in our prisons, it’s in our communities. We have to do something about it.”
Constantine said it was now up to local leaders to act.
Whitney Bashaw, who lives and works next door to the now-closed El Rey treatment facility, said she has seen firsthand what happens when the treatment center closes. The 60-bed inpatient treatment facility closed in fall 2020.
“We talked to a lot of them when it was closed and they didn’t know what they were going to do, where they were going to go,” Bashaw said. “We’ve seen them in the street or heard about them going through a really, really tough time.”
Bashaw is happy to see that the local government is working to fix the problems she sees every day.
“It’s clear that inequality is a product of the policies we implement or fail to implement in our cities,” Bashaw said. “I’d rather see people housed and cared for than an empty building rotting away with people on the streets.”
As of the evening of January 30, 3 MPs have replied to KING 5 how they plan to vote. Girmay Zahilay and Jeanne Kohl-Welles plan to vote in favour. Reagan Dunne is still under consideration, looking forward to this discussion.
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